Endurance
by Elizabeth Culmer
Summary: Endurance - "The thing is," Susan tells Edmund once, "you have to live in the world you're given." Remembrance - Just as no one is told any story but her own, no one can live any life but her own.
1. Endurance

**Disclaimer:** The _Chronicles of Narnia_ is the intellectual property of C. S. Lewis and his estate. No money is being made from this story, and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

**Author's Note:** This story is my stab at the obligatory 'problem of Susan' story everyone who writes Narnia fanfiction seems to produce sooner or later. Inspired by the 4/15/09 word #106 on the 15_minute_fic livejournal community. Book canon.

**Summary:** "The thing is," Susan tells Edmund once, "you have to live in the world you're given."

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**Endurance  
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"The thing is," Susan tells Edmund once, "you have to live in the world you're given." No matter what you remember, no matter what you dream, the sky is above you, the earth below you, and people all around you, boxing you in, setting the limits of the possible and the permissible.

Maybe she's meant to be strong enough to shatter those limits. But Susan knows herself, and she knows with a quiet, cold certainty that sooner or later she'd break under the strain of that battle.

Yielding is better.

She wraps Narnia and Aslan deep inside, a warm ember to touch in her weakest moments, and gets on with living. Talking about magic lands inside wardrobes will make people call her mad. So she pretends not to remember. Behaving like a queen will make people think her over-proud, naïve, or mad again. So she watches her classmates and imitates them, scrupulously. Expecting equality will only bring heartache. So she learns to chatter and focus on trivialities in public, and bend all her intelligence to finding a job and saving money and making a place to call her own.

Maybe then, once she's established her sanity, once she's disguised herself with years of commonplace behavior, once she has mundane security, she can pull out that ember and blow it back to life. Or maybe not. Maybe Queen Susan the Gentle will always be her private heartbreak and exaltation.

And would that be wrong? Not everyone is called to glory. Not everyone is called to testify in flame and stars and trumpets. Not everyone is taken living into heaven. Most people simply live as best they can.

This is what Peter and Lucy won't ever understand. So Susan laughs through frozen smiles and slides into her chosen disguise and watches them blaze like comets, scorching through the limits of this world of their exile. She watches how they gather fear as much as admiration, how they walk in growing isolation, how they puzzle helplessly over England's petty cruelties and injustice. This is the world they're given, but they refuse to accept it.

"The thing is," Edmund tells Susan, "the world you're given may not be enough."

"So who changes: you or it?" she asks.

Edmund smiles. "Peter would change the world. Lucy would change the way she saw the world, and make the world change in return. You would change yourself."

"And you?" Susan asks.

Edmund shrugs. "I don't think one man can change a whole world alone. But I worked too hard to find myself to start living behind a false face again; there's too much danger I might forget it's only an act. So I fight what I can't endure and endure what I can't fight, and trust that Aslan will help me find the balance."

"I'm no use at battles," Susan tells him. "I'd go mad. Or I'd come to hate... well, you know. I'd rather become a stranger to myself than hate him. I'm not strong enough to stand alone against the world."

"Who says you'd be alone?" Edmund asks, and leaves Susan to stare at her careful shields of clothes and make-up in silence.

Now Susan counts the bodies at the morgue, picking her way gingerly over the frozen floor in her heels and nylons and pretty floral dress. She can survive even this, she knows. She can continue in her chosen path, her camouflage of ordinary life. But... what if Edmund was right? What if she risks a stand? She whispers Aslan's name, and the ember in her heart stirs with a swirl of gold.

She was never one for battles, always the first to compromise. And that's a virtue, too - knowing when to yield - but any virtue, carried to its logical extreme, becomes a vice, a trap, a smaller box within the prison of the world.

Susan reaches down with one hand to close Lucy's eyes.

England is the world she's given. One way or another, she will make it be enough.

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**AN:** Thanks for reading, and please review! I appreciate all comments, but I'm particularly interested in knowing what parts of the story worked for you, what parts didn't, and _why_.

**Special Notice!** **furies** has remixed this story for Remix Redux 9 as **Once a Queen (The Reality Bites Remix)**. You can read it at archiveofourown. org/ works/ 189900


	2. Remembrance

**Disclaimer:** The _Chronicles of Narnia_ is the intellectual property of C. S. Lewis and his estate. No money is being made from this story, and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

**Author's Note:** This story was written in March 2010 for **uminohikari** as part of an imaginary sequels meme; she asked for a follow-up to "Endurance." Instead of writing a teaser sentence or three, I somehow ended up with an entire ficlet, which is nominally in the form of a human interest news article. (Yes, really. No, I have no idea what I was thinking either.) This story has been slightly edited from its livejournal form.

Please note that "Remembrance" is not necessarily what _did_ happen after "Endurance." It's simply one of many things that _might_ have happened. I left "Endurance" open-ended for a reason.

**Summary:** Just as no one is told any story but her own, no one can live any life but her own. That does not stop Susan Pevensie from trying to carry out her family's dreams.

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**Remembrance**  
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She will not be canonized; the Church of England does not claim that power. But the Archbishop of Canterbury announced yesterday morning that Dr Susan Pevensie will be remembered in the calendar of Common Worship as a beloved example of what one person can do to advance God's work on earth.

Dr Pevensie's charitable children's medical organization, Lucy's Cordial, operates in partnership with Médecins sans Frontières and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1972 for its work to mitigate the suffering of children in Vietnam and the surrounding regions. Her advocacy for women's rights won her international acclaim in the 1980s and 1990s. Queen Elizabeth II admitted her to the Order of the British Empire as a Dame Commander in 1987, though Dr Pevensie preferred not to use the title.

Dr Pevensie always seemed puzzled by the adulation she received. "I don't deserve praise," she said, in a 1999 interview. "I've done nothing that other people haven't also done, and I've done none of that alone. Don't think that I'm any better than you. Open your heart and God will lend you strength to do the right thing, just as he has helped me."

Dr Pevensie's faith and calling, the common story goes, came from her grief after the loss of her parents, siblings, and cousin in a terrible railway accident in 1949. This idea persisted even after the posthumous publication of her private journals, which speak of a shared vision she and her siblings experienced during their childhood evacuation from London, and of her struggle to reconcile that vision - that personal experience of God - with her desire for an ordinary life. The later tragedy was simply a reminder.

_"I identified the bodies in the morgue this afternoon,"_ Susan Pevensie wrote the day after her bereavement. _"I have been fighting for so long, without admitting to myself what I was doing. I told Edmund I could not fight the world. He was too kind to tell me that by surrendering that battle, I was fighting myself, fighting my family, and fighting Him. I left myself utterly alone, for the world did not care to see me, only my flag of surrender, and false friends are no exchange for love. But if I fight the world, I open myself again to Him; then I am never alone."_

Here there is an inkblot in the original manuscript.

_"They are all in His country now, beyond the ends of the world,__ and I am glad for them," _the writing continues,_ "but if only I had trusted Him to lend me strength, instead of measuring my own heart and finding it wanting, and forgetting that my own heart is never all that I have to lean on - if I had listened to Edmund, and Lucy, and Peter..."_

Another inkblot.

_"__If one of us had to remain, best for it to be me. I am the one who waits at home while others go forth to battle. This will be a longer wait, but I am sure I will find tasks to occupy the years, and at least now I have no need to fear anyone's fate but my own."_

Two months later, when her parents' wills had been mostly executed, Susan Pevensie quit her secretarial position and began training as a paediatrician. Six years later, she founded Lucy's Cordial, endowing it with her entire inheritance. By 1960, Lucy's Cordial had expanded to every Commonwealth nation, as well as most of Western Europe. In 1976, Dr Pevensie allied Lucy's Cordial with Médecins sans Frontières. At the time of her death, Lucy's Cordial operated permanent missions in 157 countries, and had a well-trained and funded crisis response system.

_"Medicine was never truly my calling,"_ Dr Pevensie wrote in 2005, one month before her death in a suicide bomb attack in Fallujah, where she was overseeing the expansion of a Lucy's Cordial mission hospital. _"Lucy was the healer among us; my interest lay more in beauty and gentle persuasion. But this world is so desperately in need of healing, and I wished to honour Lucy's memory, so I pretended to be her rather than myself._

_"One cannot live another's story, so perhaps it is not surprising that I drifted away from the practicalities of the organization and became something of a one-woman protest movement in service of human rights. I am only thankful that I had the good sense not to attempt living Peter's and Edmund's lives as well. I make a passable doctor with some effort, but as a general, a minister, an MP, a barrister, or a judge, I would be a laughingstock."_

Here there is a faint line, as if Dr Pevensie rested her pen on the page for a moment, followed by, _"Perhaps I might have made a passable MP. But there is no point wondering what might have happened. This is the life I made with the world I was given, and it is more than enough."_

Whatever might have happened to Susan Pevensie had she followed another path, it is certain that without her tireless work for justice and fair treatment for all people in all nations, our world would be a poorer place. On March 4th, the Church of England will attest to that truth.

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**AN:** Thanks for reading, and please review! I appreciate all comments, but I'm particularly interested in knowing what parts of the story worked for you, what parts didn't, and _why_.

I chose 1972 as the year for Susan's Nobel Prize because in our world, no prize was awarded that year. +grin+ I make no guarantees for the accuracy of any other stuff, though I did poke around Wikipedia a bit for some general background information, and I _think_ I have the correct British spellings and abbreviation usage. My phrasing is probably hopelessly American, though, and I'm sure it's not concise enough for a real newspaper article.


End file.
